The snapshots of Iraqi prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib were taken by soldiers and shared in the digital military netherworld of Iraq. Their release to the world in May last year detonated a media explosion that rocked a presidential campaign, cratered America's moral high ground, and demonstrated how even a superpower could be blitzkrieged by some homemade downloadable porn. In the middle of it all, a lone reservist sergeant stationed on the Iraqi border posed a simple question:

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I cannot help but wonder upon reflection of the circumstances, how much longer we will be able to carry with us our digital cameras, or take photographs and document the experiences we have had.

The writer was 24-year-old Chris Missick, a soldier with the Army's 319th Signal Battalion and author of the blog A Line in the Sand. While balloon-faced cable pundits shrieked about the scandal, Missick was posting late at night in his Army-issue "blacks," with a mug of coffee and a small French press beside him, his laptop blasting Elliot Smith's "Cupid's Trick" into his headphones. He quickly seized on perhaps the most profound and crucial implication of Abu Ghraib:

Never before has a war been so immediately documented, never before have sentiments from the front scurried their way to the home front with such ease and precision. Here I sit, in the desert, staring daily at the electric fence, the deep trenches and the concertina wire that separates the border of Iraq and Kuwait, and write home and upload my daily reflections and opinions on the war and my circumstances here, as well as some of the pictures I have taken along the way. It is amazing, and empowering, and yet the question remains, should I as a lower enlisted soldier have such power to express my opinion and broadcast to the world a singular soldier's point of view? To those outside the uniform who have never lived the military life, the question may seem absurd, and yet, as an example of what exists even in the small following of readers I have here, the implications of thought expressed by soldiers daily could be explosive.

His sober assessments of the potential of free speech in a war zone began attracting a wider following, eventually logging somewhere north of 100,000 pageviews. No blogging record, but rivaling the wonkish audience for the Pentagon's daily briefing on C-Span or DOD press releases.

Missick is just one voice - and a very pro-Pentagon one at that - in an oddball online Greek chorus narrating the conflict in Iraq. It includes a core group of about 100 regulars and hundreds more loosely organized activists, angry contrarians, jolly testosterone fuckups, self-appointed pundits, and would-be poets who call themselves milbloggers, as in military bloggers. Whether posting from inside Iraq on active duty, from noncombat bases around the world, or even from their neighborhoods back home after being discharged - where they can still follow events closely and deliver their often blunt opinions - milbloggers offer an unprecedented real-time real-life window on war and the people who wage it. Their collective voice competes with and occasionally undermines the DOD's elaborate message machine and the much-loathed mainstream media, usually dismissed as MSM.

Milbloggers constitute a rich subculture with a refreshing candor about the war, expressing views ranging from far right to far left. They also offer helpful tips about tearing down an M16, recipes for beef stew (hint: lots of red wine), reviews of the latest episode of 24, extremely technical discussions of Humvee armor configurations, and exceptionally raw accounts of field hospital chaos, gore, and heroism.

For now, the Pentagon officially tolerates this free-form online journalism and in-house peanut gallery, even as the brass takes cautious steps to control it. A new policy instituted this spring requires all military bloggers inside Iraq to register with their units. It directs commanders to conduct quarterly reviews to make sure bloggers aren't giving out casualty information or violating operational security or privacy rules. Commanding officers shut down a blog that reported on the medical response to a suicide bombing late last year in Mosul. The Army has also created the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell to monitor compliance. And Wired has learned that a Pentagon review is under way to better understand the overall implications of blogging and other Internet communications in combat zones.

"It's a new world out there," says Christopher Conway, a lieutenant colonel and DOD spokesperson. "Before, you would have to shake down your soldiers for matches that might light up and betray a position. Today, every soldier has a cell phone, beeper, game device, or laptop, any one of which could pop off without warning. Blogging is just one piece of the puzzle."

Strong opinions throughout the military ranks in and out of wartime are nothing new. But online technology in the combat zone has suddenly given those opinions a mass audience and an instantaneous forum for the first time in the history of warfare. On the 21st-century battlefield, the campfire glow comes from a laptop computer, and it's visible around the world.

"In World War II, letters basically didn't arrive for months," says Michael Bautista, an Idaho National Guard corporal based in Kirkuk whose grandfather served in World War II and who blogs as Ma Deuce Gunner (named for the trusty M2 machine gun he calls Mama). "What I'm doing and what my fellow bloggers are doing is groundbreaking."

If you're stuck in southern Baghdad in the dusty gray fortress called Camp Falcon and find yourself in need of 50-caliber machine-gun ammo, chopper fuel, toilet paper, or M&M's, you call Danjel Bout, a 32-year-old captain and logistics officer from the California National Guard who blogs as Thunder 6. He's been stationed here with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division for most of 2005. When he's not chasing down requisitions of supplies or out on patrol hunting insurgents, Bout is posting about the details of Army life in language evocative of literary warbloggers of yore like Thucydides, Homer, Thomas Paine, and John Donne.